IoT: Collaboration Required

In the past century or so, the world has gone through vast changes. Much of the world and land borders have settled and we’ve had a wave of peace between the biggest nations. Nationalism has been replaced by globalism, especially across Europe. That same sort of national collaboration is needed for the Internet of Things to be successful in the days to come.

It’s all proprietary, now.

With all the new technology coming out from companies across the globe, each with their own coding language and practices, you can’t expect them to be able to send, receive, and understand other device’s data without help. And if devices can’t understand each other, any data sent and collected becomes useless and the IoT fails.

The reason most companies want to keep their information secret is to have a leg-up on their competition. Unfortunately, when it comes to the IoT, this inability to cooperate between companies hurts us all.

Expanding the Network

Think of the Internet of Things as a spider web. Just a strand from one device to another isn’t very helpful. As we add more lines, the weave becomes more intricate (companies start talking to each other and sharing information), our devices are able to communicate more and more.

Information needs to be shared between companies for the Internet of Things to succeed. Companies have got to start coming together and talking to each other or we’ll just have a hundred different single-strand “webs” with little purpose past connecting a couple devices.

Global standards are another way to go, though.

Giving companies a set of rules to adhere to for information transferring could work. After all, if every company agrees to adhere to the same guidelines in data collection and receiving, then devices talking to each other would be no problem at all! Companies don’t have to give out their secrets anymore.

Of course, this too will come with risks. For instance, security might be sacrificed for global coding standards. Once hackers know exactly what to look for in the code, they’ll always find a way inside. And with how sensitive the IoT is already to hacking, it could lead to some massive attacks.

In reality, there’s never a perfect solution to please everyone. Even now, we’re having trouble implementing smart traffic lights, something one might initially think is simple. In the real world though, there are hundreds of different types of cars and dozens of on-board computers with different code in each. Collaborating with that many companies is a huge endeavor, and the same will be true with most projects.